Daniel Dixon on Being the Lighthouse for Agents | Ep 009

No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte. For insights into starting, growing and optimizing a real estate team, we're talking with Daniel Dixon, owner and CEO of the Dixon Group. A couple of fun facts before we get going. He's also the owner and CEO of First Step Home Loans and and the operating principle of Keller Williams Denver Southeast. And he's on a mission to empower people of color to earn more, learn more, and truly build wealth as a host of the Color of Money podcast. Daniel, thank you for talking Team OS today.

Yeah, my pleasure, Ethan. I'm glad to be here and just pour into our community.

Yeah, and you really do. You know, I have a set of things I'd love to talk with you about, including your work with Big Brothers, Big Sisters, which is going on a dozen years already and a number of other things you're involved in. But I want to kick this off where we always start, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. When I offer that to you, what comes to mind? Daniel?

So when we think about the avatar and who you want to build a team with and who you want to lock arms with, the first thing that comes to mind is athletes. What we look for and what we're trying to build with our culture of our organization is people that have been through some adversity. They understand what it's like to get knocked down. They may or may not have a chip on their shoulder. They that want to actually go prove other people wrong and grind. We're in a unique, we're in a unique market right now where like we've got to grind, we've got to work for everything that we do. And a lot of folks that didn't understand sports and playing sports and grinding, or it can be competitive dance, I don't care what it is, but something that you had to prepare for, you had to potentially be let down and work harder towards. And we've seen those, those agents completely flourish inside of our organizations.

Yeah, adversity, the ability to pick yourself back up. The idea that that's just part of the process. It's not some like consequential failure. It may be a failure in the moment, but, you know, we have to keep moving no matter what. For folks who are listening and not watching a, we put these up in full at YouTube. It's just YouTube.comealestateteamos over Daniel's shoulder, both of his shoulders. One is an image of Mike Tyson. The other is an image of Jerry Rice and Joe Montana. Daniel, I'd love for you to speak to either or both of. In the context of locking arms, moving forward in preparing to pick yourself and. Or pick the other person up in the face of adversity.

Yeah, I think the first one we're gonna start with is Mike Tyson. Cause, you know, we all have a plan till we get punched in the face. And I think as real estate agents right now in 2024. Excuse me, 2023, we've gotten punched in our face a lot this year. So your business plans, your intentions, all of those things are having to be readjusted and pivoted throughout the year. And just I love understanding what greatness looks like. Studying Jerry Rice, studying Joe Montana. Kobe's a big. Another person right above my head is a big, you know, having the mama mentality and just striving to continue for greatness. Like, we're in an industry that is okay with a lot of people that are okay with being okay. And it's just a constant reminder that none of these people on my wall were okay with being okay. They wanted eliteness. They wanted greatness, and they put forth the work, the effort, the energy, the determination, the focus, the sacrifice, all of the things to be the best at what they do. And I just. I really hope that we can get more individuals like this in real estate.

Yeah, I. You know, when I think about Kobe Bryant in particular, that was not as recognizable. Oh, yeah. I see it now. I see the 24 jersey, like, okay, good. Any case, when I think about someone like him and the stories that I've heard and, you know, I read one of Tim Grover's books, of course, which is relentless in part the Kobe Bryant story, or at least, like, looks behind the curtain of what it takes to be truly excellent. I wonder about, like, the willingness to straight up work hard. I feel like that fell a little bit out of, of, like, culture. I. I know there's, like, the hustle and grind mentality, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but on average, I feel like we're more about, like, leverage and working harder or, sorry, working smarter, not hard. Think, like, in so many things in life, there is a middle way between working smarter and working harder, and I think you need some of both to get where we want to go. Did that trigger anything for you? Like, speak to just, like, the. The. The grind and maybe Some of the way that it's been misused and. Or dismissed.

Well, I think the last few years, I think that a lot of agents did work hard, but they didn't really work hard to get the business. They worked hard to service the business. And right now, we're working hard in a different way because, I mean, we had agents on our team that were showing, writing five offers, six offers a week to get their people under contract. We worked really hard, but in a different way. And in the world that we're in now, we've got to work hard to go get the business, and then we're. Then we need to service the business. And so I think we worked really fast before, and now we're really needing to get in that skills based on market where we've got to be good at our craft. We can't just be an agent anymore. We have the buyer agency lawsuit that we're up against, where buyer agents are gonna have to start really, you know, pitching their value to their clients on why they need to work with them and why they may need to pay a piece of the commission, because they don't. You know, buyer's agents don't work for free. We're always paid by sellers. So it's just the frustrating thing for me when I see the amount of potential that we have with agents in this industry or loan officers or anybody, and you just not willing to do the work or grind or just push through the pain and the challenges that we have. To live your best life and reach the maximum potential you have. My biggest fear in life, Ethan, is being on my deathbed and saying, man, I could have given more. I could have gave more. I could have done more to influence people, to help people, to grow humans, to build a bigger business. I want to exhaust all that I have while I'm on this earth, man.

Okay. I can't wait to ask you how you rest, relax, and recharge at the end of this, because it, like, that's a constant tension. But the, you know, I guess I'm drawing again on my conversation with Tim Grover, which is the difference between. And you made me think of this because you talked about, like, on my deathbed, because the. The privilege that an athlete has is that the bell does ring, the buzzer does buzz, the clock does hit zero, and there's an end. And you want the same thing. You want to know, like, I put it all out there tonight or this afternoon or whatever. I did the most that I could to help myself and my team. You know, do what we're out here to do in business, it's so much more challenging because there is no buzzer. It's always going. And in theory, you, you know, you could be grinding well into the deep hours of the night, but there's like a balance there.

Well, I think that what a hack that, that I did when I was a young agent and what we encourage courage, our agents to do, you can, you can bullshit a lot of people, but it's really difficult to bullshit yourself because you know what you're telling yourself. And so if you just simply looked in the mirror before you left every day and rate yourself on a scale from one to 10, every day is not going to be a 10. That's not the intention. But having those honest conversations with yourself and saying, man, I could have given more today and I'm going to be better tomorrow. As long as we have the awareness and as long as we have the wherewithal now it's just a matter of doing the work. Too many agents, I mean too many people in general, just they're too into their feelings and how they feel for the day. We try to remove the feelings and have fact based conversations on execution. We don't care how you feel, whether you're under the weather, you have a runny nose, or whatever it is. Like, here's what I said I was gonna do today, come hell or high water, I got to do what I said I was gonna do. And if you can't look at yourself in the mirror and say, I said I was gonna do this and I didn't do it, that's a deeper conversation you need to have with yourself on what do I really want in life and where am I, where am I really going?

Yeah. And it reminds me of a truism I like to offer in the right context, which is that the exception becomes the rule. You know, like, you may have a rule that I do this every day or I do this every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but the first exception is essentially the new rule unless you correct it immediately. I'd love for you to share a little bit about how you kind of coach this, maybe even like, like what is the difference in the way that you bring messages like this and the way that you bring fact based conversations, the way that you bring a very direct and respectful form of accountability in a group setting versus a one on one setting? I think it's, it's, I think those might be different. I mean, I know in my experience I've treated them a little bit differently because you can be harder or more direct, or you need to maybe take a slight side route with different individuals. But the group setting is, I think is what's interesting and challenging. Like talk about how you manage both of those.

So it's interesting because my, my level of leadership and at the end of the day, man, like we've, we've done a lot of things and I'm, I'm still on my leadership journey. I'm still on my journey to get better and be better. I make mistakes every single day. So I don't want any of the listeners to think that anything's been figured out yet. This is a journey of life, of constant, never ending improvement. Now I grew up, I played sports my entire life and I know one on ones are important and some people have the mindset that no one gets called on the mat in front of everybody. But that's not the way I grew up. In a team sport like team sports are, if you screw up, we're going to talk about it, we're going to get better at it, but you're going to be accountable to what you're doing. And so we do one on one conversations and we have one on ones where we talk about accountability and we talk about, you know, your goals and some of those other things. And then we also have group accountability meetings. Every huddle. Now, one of the pivots we recently made, Ethan, we were talking offline before we, before we got on, just about, you know, Daniel losing his shit on Monday on my team because we're like, guys, what are we doing right now? And so all we've done is we've increased the accountability so we have the systems, we use the CC's and Maverick and we have all this stuff for everyone to see what they're doing. But our huddles just changed. So every morning we are recapping what we did from the previous day. How many calls did you make, how many conversations did you have? How many appointments did you set? How many appointments did you hold every single day? I think that accountability is the highest form of love. But what problem is we're doing it too late. If we're not meeting with one on ones, we're doing it maybe every, every two weeks, it's too late. And so when we start falling off or, you know, not hitting what we need to hit, what we do in our organization is we increase the accountability around whatever the metric is that we're after. And right now it's activity, it's do more work, talk to more people, book more Appointments get more face to face. Before it was four pre approvals to one under contract. Maybe, shoot, it might be six or seven. Now. This is a math. This is a numbers game. It's a math equation that we've got to figure out. And as the market gets. As the market changes, there's still thousands and thousands of transactions happening every single month. The goal for us is we got to find the motivated. So we need to make more contacts and talk to more people to find the people that are really motivated. There's some people out there, believe it or not, that do not care about an 8% interest rate. They don't care. They want a house. There's some people that are selling houses and getting rid of their 3% rate because they need something bigger or smaller for their family. We're in. The goal for everyone right now is going and finding the motivated. How can we find the people that have a true need and don't want to move because they just want to. That we've been accustomed to over the last probably four or five years, for that matter. And how do we find the people that really have life events that they need a professional real estate agent to help guide them through that next chapter, that next phase of their life?

Yeah, I love the call to accountability in the earliest activities, in the earliest stages also, by the way, just to call back to the idea of skills based, I guess, skills based accountability even, which is, you know, call is not a call is not a call. Let's get really good at these calls. A convertible conversation is not a conversation. It's not a conversation. The nature of the conversation today is different than it was two years ago. We need to master today's conversation, which is a little bit, maybe a little bit more guidance, a little bit more inquiry, a little bit more movement toward understanding why you're feeling a little bit chill or slow or whatever. And you also reminded me of a quote. I guess it's a paraphrase from Tiffany Galzinis back on episode five of this show, which is the dollars and cents are trailing indicators. The trailing indicators of all of this stuff that you've been talking about. Okay. Typically, Daniel, I like to get into a little bit of your journey and why you were essentially forced to build a team for yourself. But what I want to do is pull forward instead. Kind of like a. I want to spend a little bit of time in something that you shared with me. When we met about a week ago, you picked up the phrase be the lighthouse, and it was immediately resonant with you and you said it was pretty impactful on. And I feel like we've already already gotten some hints and some flavor of what's going on with you related to that, given the season that we're in. But I'd love for you to kind of walk that out. Where did you pick that up? Why did it connect with you? And maybe how did you spin on it a little bit mentally before you turned it into some action or some conversation?

Yeah, this is kind of my thing now. I was at a Rise. RiseCon event in Vegas and I was listening to John Cheplak speak, and one of the things he said, he's like, are you the lighthouse for agents? And for me, I went, oh, my God. Like we. When you think about a lighthouse, it's. It's a lot of times for these. These ships to understand where land is. And so when we think about this and we think about agents right now, the agents inside the brokerage that we have, the agents on our team, agents that we're recruiting, everybody, it feels like everyone's lost at sea and they're just confused. They don't know where. Where the true north is. They don't know where land is. And so our new saying, taking it from John, is man, we've got to be the lighthouse for agents. We've got to be their direction. Come with us, come lock arms with us. Use the systems, use the tools, use the knowledge, use the experience. Help get you out of the storm, dust you off, and then get you focused on the next place that we're going. And I think one of the unique things about owning a brokerage is the way that I help and guide those agents on the brokerage side is vastly different than the way I coach and train my agents for the Dixon Group. And so one common theme right now is not people do not have clarity. We're in goal setting season right now. How do you set your goals for next year? No one knows what's going to happen. Are we going to have 7 and 8% rates all year? Are we going to look at increasing our business as we've done 20, 25% year in and year out? Like, how do we understand what's happening as we get into next year? And then are we with the brokerage? Are we with the team? Are we with the circle of people that can help guide us out of this and then help build a bigger business once things turn? And so just that one. That's what I love about these events, Ethan. Like, you go to these events and sometimes you Take crazy, copious notes. And other times you have 1, 2, 3 nuggets that you get. And, like, that was aha. For me, that is the thing that I'm teaching my leaders now. We need to be the lighthouse for agents. We need to help guide them through this pain and through the challenge we're in, in this industry in the season, and then help them understand you've got an advocate. We're on your team, we're on your side. Let's get through this together. And let's not just have a brokerage full of a bunch of individual agents. Let's not have a team that's a crab in a bucket type of mentality where everyone's just trying to succeed. Let's all lock arms together, let's find our tribe, and then let's say, hey, let's go do this together so we can all win.

Yeah. So when you heard, that was part of the resonance in that for you, where you, like, immediately clicked and turned on for you and you, like, obviously adopted it straight away. And all that was part of that, that it captured some of the spirit of what you had been feeling inside the team. And so, like, the imagery just immediately came true because it maybe reminded you of conversations or the tone of a meeting or this kind of thing, you know, increasingly over the past few months.

Well, even over the last probably six months, the agents that are in the brokerage, the agents that have come to the brokerage, I've left the brokerage, my agent friends across the country through and through, we're looking at this and we're saying, like, everyone's going through the toughest year that they've ever had in real estate right now. And no one has clarity. And oftentimes I like to say clarity equals speed. But the opposite of that. If I don't have clarity, like, I'm stuck. And so I feel a lot of people in the conversations I'm having, a lot of people are stuck and don't have that path of that way out. And no one can guide them or tell them what needs to change or how. We need to pay more attention to P Ls and KPIs and leading and lag metrics and turn this whole industry and this whole business into. Into a math equation. Calls plus contacts equals meetings. Meetings plus lenders equal. Pre approvals, pre approvals plus showings equal under contracts. Like, it's literally that simple. But if we're not paying attention and we're not looking at those numbers and those things, then it seems like we're just lost. And you think about, there's so many. I mean, the thought in my head of being lost at sea and having there be a storm happening and you're like, I don't know what's up, what's down, what's like, I don't know where I'm at. And then you see off in the distance that light, you see that lighthouse and you're like, if I can just get to that lighthouse, I'm going to be okay. And so now we're looking at it going, okay, how can we just again be that lighthouse that's shining for agents to show them? Just get here, get with us. Let's look at what happened over the last three years. Unfortunately, doesn't matter at all. We're on this next 12, 24 month journey. What needs to happen? How do you need to change? How do you need to be held more accountable? Who are you coaching with? Who is your advocate? Who's challenging you to fight through what we're in right now and come out on the other side much more successful, have much more business acumen. And you know, I still think that we're going to make more money than we've ever made. But we're in an industry right now where the strong, only the strong are going to survive.

Yeah. And that's exciting and terrifying probably intermittently. And I don't know that anyone can embrace one of those positions for too long. You certainly can't afford to. I would assume too that for you, Daniel, that there's some of this lighthouse work that needs to be done with your own staff. You know, you mentioned some of the leaders within the organization. I would guess that some of them maybe haven't been in the industry when it's been this hard, just based on age or tenure or maybe coming in from another industry. Talk about your own staff and leadership around you and kind of how this relates there too, not just to the agent population, but.

Well, when you think about this, we're in our job as leaders is to remove obstacles and help you achieve what you want to achieve and help create clarity. And so a lot of what we're talking about with our leadership team and the brokerage and with the team and on the mortgage side and everywhere is what obstacles are we up against or are your agents up against? How can we remove those and simplify everything for everybody, create clarity so we can then just be in a matter of just execution. Just execution. Like that's the thing, that's the name of the game right now. Just do the work. Just do the work. Tom Ferry says it best. You know, what's working right now for everyone is just working, like, do the work. If you continue to do the work and you stay consistent on doing the work, and we can cleanly. Cleanly and clearly articulate that to our agent partners and understand. I know our call counts need to go up. This isn't for fun. We're doing this because if you make X amount of calls, you're going to have Y amount of contacts that's going to lead to Z amount of appointments. Then if we go meet with X amount of people and Y amount, that actually show up. And it's just, again, it's a math equation. And I keep saying that it just comes back. This is a very simple thing to do. We've got to just get out of our own way. And so a lot of the conversation with our leadership team is how can we make everything more clean, everything more clear, and everything more simple for everybody inside of our organization? Get the complexity out of there. Let's understand what is the goal for the day? What do I need to hit? Are we crystal clear on what the expectation is, what needs to happen today and what that's actually going to lead to? If we can do that and simplify that for everybody in every organization, then now we just need to get them. Tim Grover says best. He doesn't motivate people. I don't have the ability to motivate you because that doesn't last very long. You've got to. You've got to light that fire in your belly.

Yeah. That's one of my favorite things in winning was the idea that, you know, if you're looking for mindset tips, don't look to me, because that's like. That's like barrier to entry. And you need to have that square before we start having a conversation about doing good work and getting good results.

Absolutely. I think. And that's why. I think why I love Tim Grover so much is because his. He's not this airy fairy. You can do it. No, he's like, man, I'm gonna kick you. You're gonna fall. I'm gonna kick you while you're down. I'm gonna lift you up, I'm gonna dust you off. I'm gonna challenge your ass again. Like, yes, please. I want more of that in my life. Because it's just we're. Again, we're in an industry that's so complacent. We've made so much money and transactions are down. But real estate commissions are up. And stop. Let's. Let's push ourself to achieve more and be better and influence more people and stop being okay with being okay. And Tim Grover's not okay with okay. No. No.

Okay. I would love for you to give us all a run up to when you decided to enter the real estate business to whatever caused you to need to put some support around you in the form of, like, the early stages of a team.

So you only have 24 hours in a day. My coach told me right when I first started coach with them. So I've been licensed agent for about nine years or so, something like that. And in year going into year two or going into year three, I was lucky enough to cross paths with some coach, friend, mentor, amazing human, Brett Tanner. And one of our first coaching calls, he was like, all right, Daniel, what happens if you get hit by a bus? I'm like, man, I'm screwed. Like, my wife doesn't work. I bring home all the money and everything in our household, and so we don't have any outs. And he goes, all right, well, we really need to start working on your business rather than in your business, because if you can, there's only 24 hours in a day, and Daniel can only do so much. So unless we're able to go teach people what you know how to do, who can then go teach people what they know how to do then now we're talking about true business building and scaling an organization, and we're not talking about Daniel being a really good agent. It was at that moment my life changed. I said, oh, I got to get myself out of production. I've got to start really paying attention to P and LS, KPIs, training programs, all of those things, and then building the bench of our leaders as our organization has grown and continued to turn over over the years. Because you can only go so far. Like, the biggest investment you can make is in people rather than any business or any property or anything like that. So then it just changed the journey for me of, okay, well, I've got to go find my leaders. I got to pour into my leaders. Then we got to go grab more agents, and we got to go recruit and we got to truly run a business. I think in our industry, Ethan, there's not very many agents that truly run real estate businesses. There's a lot of realtors, There's a lot of realtors, and I challenge a lot of the listeners. Run a business like a business because there's a lot of people that are getting punched in the face right now that has no idea where it's coming from or what to do. And if you're looking at your KPIs and you're tracking your business and you're paying attention and you're reflecting, it's way easier to find your way out and understand where you're going and what you need to do. And as we continue to scale, it just. It was one thing after the other of what we needed. We needed more support staff, we needed more operational support, we needed more leads, we needed more training. There's always something that we're lacking or that we need to do. We need to tighten up and get better on this journey that we've grown over the last couple years.

Love it. Demystify for the solo agent who. Well, and then maybe also even correct me on the way into it, you know, I feel like a solo agent needs to have a much better handle on running a business perhaps than an agent within a team. Less maybe, but demystify a little bit of that, you know, so for the person who got into the business because they really like helping people, one of their friends or a relative or a parent was a real estate agent, and they found themselves operating a business that is, you know, like, you didn't have to worry so much about expenses, you know, in 2021, because there was business and income for everyone far in excess of any expense. You know, it's just really against your times. How much can I produce? Not ye. How little can I spend to produce as much as I need to demystify P and L a little bit or demystify kind of the basics, like the guts, the blocking and tackling of getting a handle on a business for someone that really needs that now more than ever.

So I think there's. Do I have the book? I can't find. I can't find my millionaire real estate agent book right now. But I was going to use that as a. As. As the model, like the model that Gary's built, the model that Gary speaks about in that book and the model that Gary teaches inside of our company really comes down to understanding a P and L. So you understand what buckets. You have your. You have your. Your salaries, you have your overhead, you have your cost of goods sold at those different percentages that are tied to the model or whatever business that is that you want to run. Understanding there's a bucket for all of these. Your P and L is just making sure. Is my bucket too full? Is my bucket not Full enough or am I right where I need to be? And so I often say, what you measure, you move. And so many agents, we live closing to closing, paycheck to paycheck. And even though those paychecks are really big paychecks, we're still living, closing to closing, and paycheck to paycheck. And so when you start understanding and looking at how much money is going in my account, how much money is going out of my account, how much money do I have for taxes, how much money do I have for expense expenses, and you start looking at it and paying attention to it. I'm not a finance guy at all. I mean, when I first. When Brett made me start first looking at P. Ls, it was like pulling teeth. I just didn't even want to look at it because I didn't really understand what it meant and how all these things connect. And it's way more simple than you think, because it's just simply what categories and what buckets do these expenses fall in? How much am I really spending? How much am I spending in my household, my life? And I think that goes into something I'm really passionate about, which is wealth building. And every. Every first of the month, a lot of agents in my organization, my family, we look at our net worth tracker. How much money did we make last month? How many did we buy? Any more assets? What are assets worth? How many liabilities do we have? And what happened to our net worth? Did it go up? Did it go down? And when you start measuring it, you start gamifying it, and you start putting more intention behind showing up to work every day, spending less money. And I'm not. I'm not frugal, Ethan. I spend a lot of money. I love my Vegas trips. I'm naturally a risk taker, so I love gambling. Like, but there's. It all needs to be in check. If we understand what the math looks like and what buckets are too full, what buckets are overflowing, we need to make changes on. And if you're looking at it and you're monitoring it closely once a month, it's really not that difficult. But when you're doing that, you start transitioning, your brain starts thinking differently. I know one of the things we're going to talk about is ancillaries. And one of the reasons we were able to start building ancillaries is because I was looking at the math and I'm like, the math, we. I want to make more money, but I don't sell houses Anymore. So I need to go double my head count and sell a bunch more houses or increase the amount of revenue per transaction that we can, that we can generate. But again, those are business owner conversations and you're getting out of being that self employed agent and really transitioning on the other side of that class flow quadrant and becoming a business owner.

Yeah, really well done. Thank you so much for that. And to the first part of that, just for my own ignorance, do you feel like there's a. I mean, I mean, obviously every. Because you brought it to the household, like every household should be paying attention to this stuff too. It's a different form of a similar thing. But just specifically in terms of like, you know, income and outflow, do you feel like there is a little bit more responsibility on a solo agent, say inside a brokerage than then an agent inside a team? Because a lot of those specific expenses are kind of wrapped probably in the difference in the split and it's kind of organized for you and you don't have to pay as much attention.

Yeah, 100%. I think with our real estate agents, our agents have no expenses. I mean, they just pay their MLS dues every month if MLS are still able to survive after this, but they just pay their MLS dues every month. So their budgeting is really about net income in. Because we don't have any business expense. The solo agent has a lot more to be responsible for. You should have bookkeepers. You've got to pay attention closely because you have less room for error. Because now you really got to manage both. You do have expenses for your business. You do have bills that are being paid every month on credit cards and different, different things like that. And then you got to bring that to the household as well. And again, we as real estate agents, we generate a lot of our worth based on our gci. And so I learned really early, like you can have, you can make $300,000 in GCI and spend 275,000 of it, and you made 25 grand last year. Like, let's. What are we taking home? What are we keeping? What are we investing? What are we walking away from this thing with. And that's what I love about Brett and KW wealth and what he's pitching inside of our ecosystem because we should have more wealthy real estate agents. And unfortunately we don't because we're not looking at the map. We're closing deals, we're spending money, we're living a great life. And then all of a sudden we look up and say, oh shit, I'm not where I want to be. What do I do now?

Yeah, man. I feel like a lot of GCI celebration is a bit like some of the more vacuous aspects of social media. It all looks pretty good and you can feel good about yourself for a minute, but in the end, you're gonna have to deal with the reality some point. Okay, so you mentioned ancillaries. I would love for you to. I mean, you already gave a little bit of a tease about what some of your motivation was there. But where were you in the arc of your real estate team and your real estate business and kind of what order? Because if I remember correctly, you have mortgage, you have title, you have insurance, or you're maybe working on insurance. Like, talk about the sequence of those, the layering of those, like, how did that become the solution? Or the answer to the question that you asked yourself because you offered another answer that was maybe less interesting to you, which was like double agent count and crank volume. Just talk about that process and some of the decision making and even the sequencing of what you've layered into, into your operation.

Well, when you think about the conversation I had with my coach and, you know, focusing on my business rather than being in my business, it was a matter of me getting out of production. So I've been out of production for probably five years or something like that now. And when my. My livelihood is. Is based on other people doing work, it change, it changes how you show up at work every day. My kids eat if everyone does their job effectively. And so as I was getting out of production and I'm looking at P L's like, again, I wanted to make more money. I either have two options. I either need to figure out how to increase, I guess, three options. I can go sell houses myself again, which I didn't want to do. One of the main reasons I got out of production was running the business and working on my business. But I was being a terrible, terrible father and a terrible husband at that time. Because I'm trying to do all the things us real estate agents do. Trying to be dad, trying to be husband, trying to be the marketing guy, the Internet guy, service my clients at a high level, help with transaction support stuff, coach agents, train. And it's just something's going to break somewhere. And it was my marriage and my household. And so as I was getting out of production and really putting focus on that, then as I'm looking at P and Ls and looking at the amount of money, I'm like, well, I Want to make more money than this? Well, again, I can go sell, we can go double headcount and push on more transactions per agents, or we can start looking at how do we vertically integrate our businesses and create more revenue per transaction. And I think this is a really important conversation right now because real estate commissions are continuing to be compressed and we're going to continue to make less money per transaction. And when you understand the value you have as a real estate agent and how valuable that referral is that we send to the title company or we send to the loan officer or we send to the inspector, it's based on our prospecting and our hard work and us going to happy hours and us doing client events and all the different things. And we're making this entire industry go and we're feeding everybody that that has their hand in a real estate transaction. And so when we're looking at that, I mean we pay a lot of money for Internet lead generation. Like that's, that's our background, that's what we do at a high level. And so lead costs are not going down, everything is continuing to go up in cost. So the only option, the only way out was how can we monetize more of this. We built a mortgage company with the real estate hat on because of the failures that we were having from the mortgage lender that we were working with and the lack of being able to service my agents at a really high level as we continue to grow agent count. So then it was just like, eff it, I'll go do it myself. And that was a humbling experience to say the least. Like trid is a real thing. I used to say our first year I was going on an apology tour because we were missing almost every single closing because you don't know what you don't know. We're just, we're going through it. But it was understanding that if I can control, I've been let down too much. As we've grown and closed all these transactions by lenders, title companies, closers, everybody. If I can control the transaction, then I'm able to control my client experience. If I can control my client experience, then now I can get five star reviews for the service that we do and how we operate and how we do all how we do what we do at a high level. I think we have like 500 four, five star reviews on Google now for our real estate team and over 100 for our mortgage company. And it's because we can control the transaction, control the experience. If I can do Those two things at a really high level, then I'm going to be lucky enough and blessed enough to be able to monetize that piece of the transaction and then be able to start focusing on that scale that growth and then really increasing that revenue per transaction number that is slowly going down with commission, compression, lead costs, expenses. I mean, we spend over $100,000 a month to make this thing go, and we've got to be able to own all the things, control all the things, monetize the things, and then start putting the pressure on scaling all of the organizations as well.

Yeah. I appreciate your honesty about the hard first year of getting into the mortgage business.

Oh, man. My top agent's like, daniel, what are we doing? I'm like, guys, I know. I'm sorry. I'll fix it. Just give me time. Just give me. Give me a little bit of grace. I promise you I'll fix it.

Yeah, I guess with that, I would love for you to share. I assume we have a ton more real estate listeners than mortgage, although I know that we have both. What do you wish more real estate agents knew or understood about mortgage loan officers in the loan process and. Or what do you wish more mortgage loan officers knew or understood about real estate agents and the buying and selling journey? Because they both understand their piece of it from probably very. Anyone who's done it for some amount of time probably understand it really, really well. And they think they know because they know what they need from the other person and where. Where those journeys intersect. But I think there are probably some fundamentals that you could maybe shed some light on having been on having been on both sides of. Of that. That challenge and opportunity.

Man, Ethan, this is the crazy part about real estate agents and mortgage lenders is it's like oil and water. They. They have to work together, but they do not understand what each other do. It is crazy. And so they both work really hard in different ways. And so when you think about the mortgage space, the mortgage space is very detail oriented. And there's some things that are completely out of our control. You have to be very specific and very Perfect on your 1003 or your loan application, because whatever spit out that desktop underwriting system is all based on the input on all the information that you put in. One mistake can blow your entire deal up. I didn't understand the. The complexity of income calculations. It is difficult for anyone who hasn't been at their job for two years straight with a W2, it's difficult. The way you calculate overtime is different than the way you calculate an hourly wage, them switching from hourly to W2 or W2 to hourly, them having X amount of jobs in a certain period of time says, then you have to calculate their income. This way, if they're self employed, you've got to understand tax returns and schedule ease if they own additional realty. There's so many details that go into issuing a pre approval and as real estate agents we're like, hurry up, just get, just give me the piece of paper. And so you're like, alright, give me speed, I want that piece of paper. Cause I want to know if I can work with someone. And the lender's like, well they look good but I haven't seen all the documents, it doesn't matter, give me the pre approval, we'll go. And then all of a sudden, three weeks later, when they're under contract, the deal's blowing up and the agent's looking at you going, why didn't you let me know? I'm like, but you were pushing me for speed so that we don't understand what each other do. Even our teams work really closely together. We're in the same office together, there's high communication and you still have some of these things going on where I used to hold lenders very accountable and be up their ass about what they're not doing. And now I'm on the other side. I'm like, my bad, my bad, I get it, I get it. And so there's a lot of behind the scenes. I mean you can be in a loan file for two hours trying to figure out a path to get these people approved or to get them approved for more or different loan products or duplicating the loan. The 1003 to recreate the loan to find out if your desktop underwrite is going to approve. There's so many details and so many nuances. And on the real estate side it's, you're working really hard on lead generating and doing open houses and doing showings and running around town and managing and touching your database and doing all of those things. But the amount of details that you need to know on the real estate side is vastly different than it is on the mortgage side. And so it's interesting how agents are. They start learning the mortgage stuff like, nope, I don't know about it. Like, no, you should know about it. This is debt to income ratio changing by 110 of a percent. Maybe the difference on whether or not your loan gets approved. Not because I didn't know what I was doing, but because desktop underwrite is God. And the desktop underwriter will tell that. The automated system will tell you whether or not you have an approval. You can't just eyeball it. You've got to run it through the system and then you got to go prove all those details to an underwriter. So it's. They're different. I wish they knew each other more. I think our industry would move a lot better. And a lot of loan officers, they're doing, they're closing multiple loans per month. So if one falls out or they made a mistake, it's not the end of the world. Where a lot of agents, you're only closing four or five houses a year. This is your livelihood. And you make so much money on one transaction. One transaction agents are making oftentimes two, three times more than a loan officer will on one transaction. So the agent cares. I wouldn't say the agent cares more. It's just a little. They're just different. They're very, very different in an industry where they have to work so closely together.

Yeah. I feel like whenever one of your agents or LOS decides that it's time to move on, they've left with a unique value add. I can't imagine anyone turning away saying, I don't want to know about that. Like, I immediately think about how much better like an open ended discovery consult would be if I understood the mortgage process 15% better. Like, I'd just be so much more valuable to my pot buyers or sellers.

And you'd also understand when there's turbulence in your transaction or turbulence in your loan, it's not. You can't always point the finger at somebody. Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes DU does updates and when you go try to rerun your nothing changed with your loan and you rerun DU later and it doesn't like it, it wants more assets and you're like, what happened? Nothing. Well, it just wants more assets now. And so it just kind of is. And I think when you understand the other side of the house, then you're like, okay, I get it now let's problem solve on how we can get this done. And let me not just be pissed off my loan officer because I think they're lazy or they, they didn't pay attention. They should have known better, you know?

Yeah. And it's interesting too. I think a lot because you mentioned client experience before. I think so much about our own lived experience bleeds through into the client experience. It's not just about sequencing things and doing things the right way. Like what, how we show up, especially in those human to human moments makes a big difference. And so if we're kind of cranked a little bit, we don't have like empathy or understanding or patience for other people or for whatever kind of like risk, risk assessment algorithm gave you a different result five minutes after you did it the first time anyway. How would you now that you're kind of like in a variety of these businesses alongside. I love the language of if I can't do this, I could do this, I could do this. But I think I've chosen to generate more revenue from each transaction. I think that's a really interesting specific thing that you've identified for going this ancillary route now, what, a few years into it?

Yeah, four years now.

How would you advise someone who's been curious about this, but a little bit on the sidelines, like, who is this for or who isn't this for? Is mortgage the first right step? Like, you know, with a little bit of distance and. Or maybe think of a couple conversations with friends or peers of yours who've been like, dude, should I be doing this? Like, what do you think about that?

I think title is the first place to go. Because it's easy. It's easy. More simplistic, you don't have as many details. Servicing clients in the mortgage space is really difficult. And so the reason we wanted to go start our own company and go build it on our own is because I want, I wanted full ownership on the success or failure of what we do and for a lot of agents. But if I'm not out of transactions and out of the business and out of like working in the business, none of this would come, none of this would have come to fruition because I'm just too busy on the day to day writing contracts, amendment showing houses. It's difficult to try to juggle both. So I think for the solo agent that's busy, I think the best thing for you to do is create a relationship with a really good loan officer and then do some sort of msa, some sort of joint venture doing something to be able to collaborate and again, lock arms with that person and let's share the success that we have together and let's work really closely together. RESPA is a real thing and the way to get around RESPA is by owning a piece of the company. If you own it, you can eat on it. MSAs are scrutinized. Some say they're okay, some say you're not. Daniel's not an attorney, so please go check with Your with your local attorneys on what you can do and not do. But I think title is the easiest way to really be able to not have to worry about the details and the service so much and be able to know that I can escalate things that get weird in a transaction and my people are servicing my clients. That's important to me. The money piece is going to come, but I'm not going to sacrifice the money piece for lack of service or lack of control of the transaction. Like, I need to be able to move when we need to move. If we need to reschedule closing, we can do that when we need reschedule closing, get our title orders on time, communicate effectively with our closers, create a great experience throughout the process for our buyers or sellers. And that's where the whole thing starts. So I just want, I want agents to really take a step back and understand again how valuable that referral is. You going to topgolf once a quarter? Your referral is a lot more valuable than that. And it's not all about money. But I really. The vendors that we work with, I'm like, what are you doing to help my business grow? I don't just want money. We could, we could have done msa. I don't want that. What are you doing to help us scale, help us grow, help us recruit? Are you really a partner or are you just a vendor? And I think that's a really real conversation that more agents should have with their part with their vendors. Like, if you're just a vendor, that's cool too. We have some of those, but I'm looking more for partners so we can all grow together, we can all eat together, and it just makes it more of a fruitful experience when we're all winning together and it doesn't feel so one sided.

Yeah, man. So much good stuff in there. I really appreciate it. Give me a couple words. At the risk of potentially running long, but I won't keep you past the top of the hour. Give a couple words for that agent. Who's wondering, should I take the first step toward starting a team?

Ooh.

I know I just opened a giant topic, but if you're just gonna scope it for them, what are the 2, 3, 4, 5 big bucket areas to kind of look at and start making some assessments around?

I think there's a lot of misconceptions around a team. A team is you and your assistant. A team is not 20 salespeople. So it can be whatever you want to make it. I think the important thing to think about, not as we coach agents inside of our brokerage. And what I love to tell them is I've built everything from the solo agent business to the big, massive, mega team. And not all things are for all people. So if you want to build a team, I'm going to challenge you a little bit more with some questions. Like, all right, well, when we fast forward 24 months from now, like, what does your perfect world look like? You all the way out of transactions, Are you still selling a little bit? Do you want to lead people? Because you're going to have to go slow before you can go fast. So are you willing to make less money and pour your life into these other individuals to hope they stay loyal to you and grow with you and expand with you? Or do you want to just go sell a whole bunch of fricking houses and then support yourself with showing assistance and transaction coordinators and an assistant to do these other things for you? A team is two people. A team is 70 people. And everywhere in between, get clear on what you want to build and what your happiness looks like. Because the days of just, I'm going to have a team, they're going to go sell houses for me, and they're going to give me half their commission. Like, that shit's over. Agents are savvy to that now. That's not happening so much anymore. What does that value add look like? And again, I go back to the lighthouse conversation. How can you be the lighthouse for them? If you're unsure or you're unclear, you're not emulating the behavior that you expect your team to do, it's going to stand out like a sore thumb. Like, it's. It's clear as day who you are and what you really want. Everyone wants to make money, but no one wants to make money off a lack of somebody caring what you're doing and what you're pouring in to help them build personally, professionally, financially. Building assets, buying assets. Like, there's so many more levels to this thing when you think about a team. So don't go really big. Start small. Leverage yourself. Pour into that person. Understand their needs, their desires, what they want. The thing that changed in my life, Ethan, is that I realized, I mean, Zig Ziglar, my first job was selling timeshares. And it was a crazy job when I was 18 years old. But one of the things I learned early was Zig Ziglar. And one of his sayings that still resonates with me is, if I can help other people get what they want in life, then I'm going to naturally get what I want. And so my focus now with my team is not about what Daniel wants to grow or what I want to achieve. A lot of our goals in our organization are tied to the amount of agents we have and what they want to go to. We want to go sell 275 million here in Colorado, but that's because I want 20 agents making six figures. I want another 20 agents making 80 to 90,000 a year. And then we're going to have this smaller group of newbies that are coming up and hitting it. All that together is 275. It's not just Danny wants to sell 275, so we're number one. It's tying it back to other people because no one. It's a cliche, but no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think when you. When you. When you team build and you grow, these individuals, you've got to know their kids names, their spouse's names, their desires. What are they after? When is it time for you to tell them you're grinding? You need to take a day off and go chill because you're going to burn yourself out. Like having those conversations and knowing your people are incredibly important and just being really clear on where you're going. What is your world? We don't spend enough time dreaming, especially right now in. In business planning season. We're not spending enough time dreaming on what is my perfect world look like? Take money out of it. What does my perfect world look like in 24 months from now? Mine is watching all of my other people succeed because I know if all of them are succeeding, then we're winning, our organizations are winning, everyone's happy. We have great retention rates. Like all the things, man.

Love that so much. You brought us kind of like right back to where we started, right here at the ending. Before I let you go though, Daniel first, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. I've got a few pairs of questions for you, and you only have to answer one of each.

Okay.

Okay. What is your favorite team to root for besides your own team? Or what's the best team you've ever been a member on besides your own team?

So definitely the San Francisco 49ers. I'm a football nut, and that's my team. My first me loving football and getting into football was my grandma's fault for taking me to a UCLA Bruins game when I was like 6 years old or something like that. And at the time, I believe it was J.J. stokes was one of the receivers who ended up getting drafted by the Niners, kind of followed him, and then fell in love with Terrell Owens and his catch he had in the playoffs against the. The Packers. And he's crying. And so I've been a Niner fan my literally almost my entire life. And so that's definitely my. That's definitely my team. Bang bang, Niner gang.

Okay. Love it. Well done. I might have to throw that up as a hashtag just to get more people to check this episode out. They'll be like, what did I get myself into? Oh, this is good advice. Daniel, what is one of your most frivolous purchases? Or what's a cheapskate habit that you hold on to even though you probably don't need to?

Oh, this is so bad. So I have this issue when I'm on an airplane of paying for wi fi. It's $8. It's 6. Whatever the number is, it doesn't matter to me if I'm not gonna get at least like, an hour and a half, two hours, laptop out doing work. I have such a hard time paying for it. Even my wife's like, hey, I need to log on for something real quick. I'm like, you can't wait till we land? So it's. It makes no sense. The other one is rental cars. For whatever reason, whenever I travel, I find the cheapest rental car, and I'll go stand in a crazy line to save $3 a day on a rental. Again, makes absolutely no sense. And every time I'm going through it, I'm like, what the hell are we doing right now? But it's just one of those things, you know?

Yeah, totally. It's funny when you made me think about how much time I spend scrutinizing decisions where the difference is, you know, 12, 15, 30 bucks. And, like, I'll drop 300 on something else without thinking about it. It's just so irrational. I'm with you, though, by the way. Like, I can't, say, spend money on airplane WI Fi. I just take books because I like two hours uninterrupted to read. Like, that's not super easy to find, like, day to day. Whereas you're, like, trapped in one of the, like, those. Even in, like, the middle of the plane where the seats are okay, you're still just, like, locked in here. Like, I like to read, and it's paid for. Last question for you. What does it look like for you to continue learning, growing and developing or what does it look like for you to rest, relax and recharge?

So I'll answer both. I think both are really important. I invest over $100,000 a year in coaching, training, events, different things because I truly believe that I'm, I'm only a tenth of the way of where I want to be. I want to build a billion dollar business and you know, we do about 150 million or so per year. And so I've got to continue to learn from the people that are doing it bigger and better for me. I've got to not be willing to think that I've got it all figured out and be willing to go get out of my city, go learn from different people that are doing different things. I pay a lot of money for coaching and masterminds and groups and a lot of these things to be able to understand that this is an investment in myself and my future. It's not an expense that we pay. And even as we did all of our expense cutting, one thing that was never on the table was our coaching and training. And then what was the second piece? Resting. Relaxing.

Yeah.

Okay. So I have, I own a real estate brokerage of about, I think we have like 105 agents. We have a real estate team with about 32 agents. Our mortgage company I think has like six people at six or seven people in it. I have three young kids, 12, 10 and five. My 18 year old nephew lives, it lives with me. I'm helping kind of mentor and raise him. I have four dogs. One dog's like 145 pounds. He's a monster. And so that like resting and relaxing, as silly as it sounds, is like being. Spending that crazy time with my family. You know what I mean? Like it's. Sometimes I wish that I had sight like reading books is not something I can do at my home. It just doesn't, it just doesn't happen. But the moments, enjoying them and playing in the backyard and wrestling with the dogs and having dance parties with the kids and doing tiktoks with my daughter and those are, those are the things that refuel me and get me in my happy place to then get ready to go take over the world.

Yeah, beautiful. If someone has gotten to this point in the conversation, pushing up on an hour, they probably might be interested in learning more about you, about the Dixon group following you. Like where would you send people that have enjoyed this conversation made to this point?

So you can email me@DanielG denver.com or you can find me on Social. I'm really like, Dion says, I'm not hard to find, but my Instagram handle is ixonsoldit. And then you can find me on Facebook. Daniel Dixon.

Awesome. I link all this stuff up. So if you're listening in Apple podcasts, Spotify or similar, there's a description down below. There are links to some of these things in there. If you're watching on YouTube, there are links down below in the description. Just pop that thing open. Daniel did not offer his email address because he doesn't want emails. Like, I can't tell you how many times Daniel, I've done the same thing. And like, you get so few emails, it's like you have access. This is a wonderful world that we live in. We have access to some awesome, interesting, accomplished people. As you already said kind of in one of your closing responses, there people doing the things that we're curious about or even actively aspiring to do and working on. Like, Daniel didn't offer that for no reason.

So no, we're. We're here to help and we're here to help. We're held our support. We're here to grow. We're here to at the end of the day, like, if I can just help pour into more agents and I don't have all time in the day, but if we can share knowledge and experiences and I'm lucky enough to be standing on the shoulder of a giant so early in my real estate career and done some really cool stuff, that's far. But if it wasn't him wanting to pour back into me, like we have a fraction of what we have today. And so my belief system is let me just pay it forward. If that's. If I can't answer if it's getting with my ops people, our director of sales, some of our top agents, we just want to be a wealth of information and just resources for everybody to get better, everybody to learn. And I'm going to plug before we leave as well, our my podcast, the Color of Money. That's a podcast about wealth building in the black community. And that's a lot of again, same kind of mindset that I'm having now, which is just pouring back and sharing information and sharing knowledge. And I hope that we can inspire, grow and change this industry with, you know, creating more millionaires and more wealthy real estate agents. Awesome.

That is also linked up right down below. Daniel, you are a gift. I appreciate your attitude and approach. We would certainly be in a better world if more people were as constructively oriented as you are. A success to you.

I appreciate it. I think we wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the people who put their arm around me and helped me succeed. And I think the best thing that we can do is continue to bring more new agents in, train them up the right way, be their lighthouse, and let's get out. We're in a really, really tough season right now, so let's lock arms. Let's get through this thing together.

Cool. Well said. Thanks for checking out this episode of Team OS. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up at realestateteamos.com.